Writing in the introduction to his new treatise on contract in 1826, Joseph Chitty observed that ‘Perhaps no branch of the jurisprudence of this country has of late years been more subject of judicial inquiry and decision than the Law of Contracts’. It is generally accepted that the so-called classical model of contract law, which remains influential into the present day, was created at this time. Ever since the subject first attracted sustained attention from legal historians in the 1970s, the driving forces of these developments have been contested. Some saw legal change as a product of economic and social factors. For others the reception of new ways of thinking and legal literature provided a more convincing explanation. What is not usually disputed is that there was a fundamental revolution in contract doctrine and literature in the nineteenth century. This assumption is open to challenge. It fails to give proper weight to the past. In fact these changes were deeply rooted in the eighteenth century and even earlier.

In the UK and across the globe, women struggle to get a place on the boards of large public companies and still take home less pay than their male counterparts. At a time of financial crisis and corporate governance failures, this lack of equality is considered especially problematic because the talents of half the workforce are not being utilised fully. This paper explores the possibility of introducing legislative gender quotas for company boardrooms in the UK. Such laws have been passed in Norway and Spain with dramatic results. Other countries, such as France and the Netherlands, look set to follow the examples of Norway and Spain. Has that time arrived in the UK?

This paper considers the relevance of a finding that, even absent the defendant's unlawfulness, the private law claimant would have suffered the losses claimed. It provides a principled framework for considering the issues raised by such a finding of ‘losses in any event’, arguing that it should be distinguished both from causation of injury and from the scope of the defendant's duty of care, and that it should be treated as raising a question of damages. It highlights the need, particularly in pure economic loss cases, for a careful comparison of the real and the hypothetical losses so as to determine whether the latter would indeed have been losses in any event. In this regard, the decision of the Court of Appeal in Calvert v William Hill Credit Ltd is subjected to close scrutiny. A more general argument advanced is that tort and contract both do and should adopt similar approaches in this field.

In Sempra Metals Ltd v Inland Revenue Commissioners, the House of Lords, by a majority, recognised the right to recover compound interest for the ‘use value of money’, an independent benefit from the principal sum. This right is based in the principle of unjust enrichment. Nevertheless, the House of Lords could not agree on the proper understanding of ‘use value of money’ and left many important questions unaddressed which are crucial for paving the way forward for a claim for the ‘use value of money’. This paper will meet the following challenges – to justify the majority's position in Sempra Metals in recognising a right to compound interest for the ‘use value of money’; deal with the theoretical basis of ‘use value of money’; and recommend a model as the way forward for this newly recognised claim.

The recent experience of the credit crunch has cast doubt on the prudence of regulation of the mortgage market based upon the concepts of responsible lending and borrowing. Both the Turner Review and the Financial Services Authority's follow-up Mortgage Market Review identified irresponsible lending as one of the principle causes of the credit crunch. Yet easy access to mortgage finance has underpinned the growth of owner occupation and the promotion of low-cost home ownership. This paper examines recent regulatory initiatives to articulate responsible lending and borrowing in more concrete terms, which suggests a shift towards greater lender responsibility through affordability checks, clearer product explanation and the possibility of product regulation. Whilst such proposals may assist in the pursuit of a more stable mortgage market, they cast serious doubt on the future sustainability of low-cost home ownership.

This paper examines the legitimacy element of the doctrine of legitimate expectations in English administrative law. It argues that the underlying principle is the voluntary assumption of responsibility that comes from analysing a promise as a social convention. From this underlying principle, it argues that the current ‘clear unambiguous representation’ test is insufficiently certain and instead advocates a three-stage test centred round the courts' ability to make an order, the objective construction of the promise and the decision makers' intent. This test, it is argued, explains the decided cases, as well as providing a robust structure for future decisions.

The rise of popular music in the twentieth century has raised questions about the appropriateness of the current system of copyright law. Copyright law is based around the notion of the individual ‘romantic’ author, an individual who creates with his own innate thoughts. Copyright law provides an exploitable property right to authors – a right, in rem, which may be exercised against the rest of the world. It is a right that may be sold and transferred, a right to which fiscal value may be placed. The property paradigm of copyright is one that is exclusionary. Popular music reveals that copyright works may be collaborative in nature, and this can bring into question whether an exclusionary property-based model is appropriate. Historically, copyright has not always been based around the property paradigm; some early cases highlighted the ‘merit’ of the potentially infringing work, and they focused on the manner of creation of that potentially infringing work. Some later cases have also emphasised the manner of creation of a copyright work. These are cases that concern what is termed ‘reverse engineering’– a modern term that encapsulates how an earlier work is used in a later work. Paradigmatically, to focus on reverse engineering is to mark a move away from the property paradigm of copyright. This paper argues that to institute such a methodological approach would lead to a more accurate ontology and would thus lead to more efficient legal regulation.